


human as i am

by endquestionmark



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4029430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamora has spent a great deal of her life angry at a lot of people, for more or less justified reasons: Thanos with a bone-deep banked roar, and Ronan more intensely, but less deeply; Nebula, now, with an anger born of sorrow, and a hundred hundred men without whom the universe would be better off. She has killed bad men and good men and men who were simply in the way. This — anger, she supposes, at a friend — is completely alien to her, and more insistent than anything she’s felt before, like an itch beneath her skin, or the gravity well of a black hole. She can’t shake it off, no matter what. It makes her want to shout at Peter, but not until he acquiesces: instead, she wants him to shout back, to engage, instead of evading, the way he always does. She wants—</p><p>Gamora realizes what she wants, suddenly, and she almost misses a step.</p>
            </blockquote>





	human as i am

**Author's Note:**

> Look, this was meant to be space pegging until it just... went wrong. The end of the semester fucks all of us up, okay.

It’s a tiny trading post, nothing near the scale of the Kyln: enough modular units connected together to house maybe twenty buyers, and docks for at most ten ships at a time. The Milano’s magnetic clamps engage smoothly — for all their pacifistic tendencies, the Nova Corps employs fantastic engineers — and the airlock hisses. Gamora reflects that it’ll be good to stretch her legs. The Milano was rebuilt with a full crew in mind, and one prone to conflict when in close quarters, but even so, it’s a flyboy ship, built for show rather than comfort. As it is, she’s lucky that there are actual rooms with doors. Peter still sleeps in his bunk off the cockpit, though that’s meant to be reserved for whoever’s on watch.

There’s something comforting about it, actually, even if it is a nuisance to feel confined to the cockpit itself. Peter sleeps far too easily for someone who spent his formative years among Ravagers, though maybe there is something to be said for honor among thieves. Gamora doesn’t need to sleep as much as he does, to begin with, but even when she does, it’s with the proverbial one eye open, and sometimes with a literal eye open. Peter had been far too amused by that, but he has a propensity for simple amusements which is akin to watching the excitable creatures of Knowhere’s betting tables going out of their tiny skulls over the sound of the bell. The more she thinks about it, the more similarities come to mind.

“Yes!” Peter crows, folding himself over the copilot’s chair, resting his chin on the headrest and scrubbing a hand through his hair. He’s been awake for a while now, humming and fidgeting and tapping a foot on the floor, but somehow he hasn’t found the motivation to get dressed. Gamora’s been sitting here for three hours in complete readiness, sword in its sheath, in more or less complete silence and stillness, but here Peter is, hair even more of a disaster now that he’s tried to fix it, shirt wearing through at the hem. He’s so sloppy — in the way he settles into the chair, a sprawling mess; in his slapdash reliance on luck; in his willingness to trust, professionally at first, and personally not too long afterwards — and she doesn’t understand how he can live like that. At some point it is going to be the reason that he _stops_ living, and the fact that she doesn’t want to think about that is almost worse than the thought to begin with. “Can I wake everyone up?” Peter says, and Gamora reconsiders: he’s probably going to die because he can’t resist some inner urge to annoy everyone nearby, skidding to a stop just short of inciting murder.

“Rather you than me,” she says, and he grins gleefully and _hammers_ the klaxon, which immediately reverberates through every corner of the Milano, made a hundred times worse by the lack of furnishings. It rattles around Gamora’s skull and sets her teeth on edge, and judging by the furious bellow from the living quarters below decks, she’s not the only one. Peter is still jabbing at the button like some sort of lab experiment in delayed gratification, proving once and for all that he has barely any concept of future planning, let alone putting aside immediate satisfaction for, in this instance, living to see another star system.

She grabs his wrist. “If you don’t stop trying to liquefy all our brains, I will remove your hand myself,” Gamora informs him. It’s a perfunctory gesture — she’s not trying to compress his bones, much as she would like to, irritable from a self-imposed sleep cycle and increasingly bland nutrient paste — but he goes as still as if she was. He isn’t grinning anymore, but he looks as if he’s forgotten what he was going to say, lips parted and eyes widening.

“I—” Peter says, and Gamora realizes that she’s been staring at him this whole time. She drops her eyes to her grip on his wrist, and the shift of his bones under her fingertips, and the way he isn’t pulling away, and then looks back to his open mouth and the confusion in his face. He’s still a mess; she’s still coiled to spring. In a minute Drax is going to come up the ladder, murder apparent in the way he’s slamming around his room, and Pete is probably going to need his hand back if he wants to have a fighting chance.

She drops his wrist as if it’s suddenly gone white-hot, snatching her hand back and flexing her fingers, closing them into a fist. “You’re a nuisance,” she informs Peter.

“A nuisance,” he says, absently. “That’s me.” He still looks as if he’s been hit very hard in the head. Gamora’s never seen that look on him, not even when she introduced herself to him by kicking him in the ribs — which, in retrospect, she wishes she’d done repeatedly — and it’s unsettling. Peter doesn’t know when to stay down. His relative silence is extremely unsettling.

“Peter!” Drax roars, and there’s a furious snarling to match from Rocket. It’s just as well that Groot hasn’t outgrown his container yet, though he could be useful in terms of preventing wholesale murder on Rocket’s part.

“Yes,” Peter says absently, “that is me, I am he—” and then everything is a little too busy for silence, and Gamora pinches the bridge of her nose and abstractly wonders if, really, heroism is worth it.

After the hectic negotiations necessary to preserve Peter’s life for another day, or at least long enough for him to get dressed — which he does showily and obnoxiously, introspection apparently knocked out of him by the imminent threat of Drax removing his head — they make it about five minutes onto the trading post, still on the docking bridge, before Peter makes a nuisance of himself again. This time, it isn’t strictly his fault, except that it’s always his fault: there’s a blur, more or less, even to Gamora’s enhanced vision, and Peter’s head snaps to the side. He stumbles back a few steps, and the blur solidifies somewhat into a person who looks more or less Terran — pale skin, short dark hair, delicate features — except for their hands. Gamora straightens up from a ready position, knees bent and elbows up, when it becomes apparent that they aren’t actually trying to kill Peter, at least so far.

“Four rotations,” they say flatly. “We didn’t invent interstellar communication for this, you know.”

“We did invent caller ID, though,” Peter mutters, and cracks his neck, digging a thumb into the hinge of his jaw. “Though the fact that you never told me your name didn’t really help with that.”

“How many of these do you see around?” they say, and Gamora finally gets a good look at their hands, charcoal-black to the wrists, and tipped with jagged, bony claws, armored down to the knuckles.

“Hey!” Peter says, apparently deciding to come off the defensive. “In my defense, it’s not like you left a note! For all you know, I spent the morning crying my eyes out.” The person snorts. “You don’t _know_ ,” Peter insists, though the effect is more or less ruined by the way he presses a hand to his chest, turning to Drax. “Drax, I’ve been cruelly used and abandoned on my own ship—”

“Say no more,” Drax says. “It is a profound relief to me that the original Milano was destroyed sometimes.”

“No kidding,” Rocket says, arms crossed. “Though I have no doubt that the new one is barely any better.”

“It’s been a month!” Peter says. “Please, I appreciate it, but let’s be reasonable.”

“Used,” the person scoffs. “If I recall—” and Peter’s eyes go wide “—that was exactly the point, wasn’t it?”

Heroism definitely isn’t worth it. Sometimes space is far too small for Gamora’s liking. It would be nice if, just once, they didn’t land somewhere and immediately learn more than they particularly wanted to know. “Can we get on with this?” she asks.

“Get on with what?” Peter and the person say at the same time, then glare at each other.

“Oh, you know,” Rocket chimes in. “Slap slap kiss, go find some storeroom to shack up in, turn up an hour after we’re all meant to be back aboard looking like you’ve lost a fight with a vacuum tube, lounge around being insufferable, I kick you in the head, you don’t even respond, Groot smiles at you no matter what, I kick you in the head again, everyone is unhappy except for you, because you’re — hey!”

“Don’t encourage him,” Gamora says, and takes her hand off Rocket’s head. “We have work to do,” she adds, this latter directed at all of them, and — though she has a hard time tearing her eyes away, just as it’s difficult to look away from a ship crash, or a star going nova — sets off down the bridge, not waiting for a response.

To her surprise, Peter is the first one to catch up, boots ringing hollow on the utilitarian metal of the passageway. She raises an eyebrow at him. Some incidents don’t deserve to be dignified with actual conversation. Peter is at least seventy percent of those incidents. He has a hand on his cheek, and when he moves it, she can see that he’s already flushed red, and — possibly those are welts, those really were very sharp claws — she isn’t inclined to sympathy, not when this is a situation that’s clearly his problem, and his problem alone. She wonders, though, at the way he runs fingertips over the welts, which have to sting, and he notices her watching him and drops his hand to his side, flushing even redder.

“Look,” he says, “I can be professional, okay, I’ll just stay out of the way, you don’t need me to seal the deal, right?”

“You _made_ the deal!” Gamora says, exasperated. “As long as you don’t have a history with at least one trader this side of the system — do you _enjoy_ having more people angry at you than live on some outer planets?”

“That’s why I avoid the outer planets,” Peter says, smirking, and dodges her elbow, sidestepping neatly. “No! All right! No, I don’t — enjoy it, that is, though you have to admit that anger adds a certain frisson—”

Gamora has spent a great deal of her life angry at a lot of people, for more or less justified reasons: Thanos with a bone-deep banked roar, and Ronan more intensely, but less deeply; Nebula, now, with an anger born of sorrow, and a hundred hundred men without whom the universe would be better off. She has killed bad men and good men and men who were simply in the way. This — anger, she supposes, at a friend — is completely alien to her, and more insistent than anything she’s felt before, like an itch beneath her skin, or the gravity well of a black hole. She can’t shake it off, no matter what. It makes her want to shout at Peter, but not until he acquiesces: instead, she wants him to shout back, to engage, instead of evading, the way he always does. She wants—

Gamora realizes what she wants, suddenly, and she almost misses a step. Peter catches her by the elbow, though she’s already regained her balance, so quickly that it must be instinctive on both their parts. She looks up at him, and she doesn’t know what he sees in her face, but it’s enough to make him hold up his other hand, open, and let her go. “Whoa, hey,” he says. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” she says, and it comes out shocked.

Peter lowers his hands slowly. “Okay!” he says. “Uh, great. Are you sure—”

“Fine,” Gamora says, again, and pushes, hard, against whatever it is that’s making her chest feel hollow, stamps it down until it’s flat, dense in her stomach. Trouble is what it is, and not the sort that’s she can fight, but the type that she can run from for a good long way, until it’s so distance-blurred that she can ignore it entirely. Rocket and Drax are bickering their way up the passageway. There’s a deal waiting for them, and then back into the black, where there are watch shifts and rooms with doors and space, merciful space to drown in. “I’m fine,” she says. “Let’s get this done.”

The deal is deceptively simple, in the end, inasmuch as a double-cross is ever simple: they leave the trading post at high speed, and under fire, which is sadly nothing new. “You, my friend,” Drax says, “have a way of bringing out the worst in people.”

“It’s part of my charm,” Peter says, though it’s slightly muffled by the coldpack he’s holding to his lip. “Jeez, that stings. Don’t you hate it when people aren’t willing to see your side?”

Personally, Gamora hates it when half the known universe loves them and the other half wants them dead, even if they haven’t actually met in person yet. She also hates it when Peter selectively omits information, like _last time I dealt with this trader she tried to remove my kidneys_ and _she told me that she’d get my liver next time but I didn’t believe her_. “You have the optimism of a misguided pup,” she tells the viewscreen, because if she looks at Peter she is probably going to jettison his kidneys into space herself, or — worse. Anything else would be worse.

“I can’t help that I expect the best,” he says. “Never hurts to prepare for the worst, though.”

“Never hurts to warn your crew, either,” Rocket says, snippy as ever.

“It went fine!” Peter says. “Everyone was fine. Mostly.” Gamora can see his reflection in the viewscreen; he winces. “It could have been worse,” he mutters, and lapses into silence.

Gamora wants to let it go. She really, really does. She’s put up with far worse in terms of careless remarks. Those, though, have — for the most part — been from enemies, not friends, and this is what nags at her so badly; this is what she’s thinking when she rounds on him, starting out of the pilot’s chair.

“It _will_ go worse,” she says. “Are you _trying_ to get yourself killed? Are you really that — that oblivious? One day somebody is going to kill you, and you’ll walk right into it. You’ll never see it coming.”

“Hey!” Peter says, and he raises his free hand. “Hasn’t happened yet.”

“Luck runs out!” Gamora says, throwing her hands up. “You can’t afford to make mistakes like that.”

“Nobody died,” Peter says, and there it is, that stubbornness that sends her hackles up and makes her want to snarl. “Nobody died, so what’s your problem?”

“You trust everyone,” Gamora says, and she’s aware that it’s ugly, and she doesn’t care. She’s angry and she’s glad. “You trust everyone and you can’t live like that, just — assuming that they—”

“Won’t stab me in the back?” Peter says, and he’s on his feet now. “You think they haven’t?”

“Spare me,” she hisses. “Lovers’ spats. Please.”

“We can’t all push everyone away,” Peter snarls, and it’s an effort to keep her hands at her sides. Her fingernails dig into her palms, and she narrows her eyes, daring him to finish his sentence. “Some of us actually _enjoy_ other people, or is that beyond you?”

“Some of us understand that maybe other people don’t enjoy _us_ ,” Gamora says, and immediately wishes that she hadn’t. It’s a statement of fact — she’s still the most dangerous woman for lightyears around, still a wanted killer, still has a bounty on her head in most star systems, though nobody’s stupid enough to actually go after it — but Peter has a tendency to complicate things, to make them personal. She doesn’t want personal. Personal is messy, just like him.

It’s too late, if the way he drops his hands is anything to go by. Even with the icepack, his lip is swollen red. Messy, she thinks again, and she’s still furious, but it’s too late. “Gamora,” he says, and she holds up a finger.

“Don’t you dare,” she says, and, as always, he completely ignores her.

“Come on,” he says. “You know me better than that.”

The thing is that she does. She knows that once he gets his hands on a problem, he’ll pick at it until it’s completely unraveled. Gamora doesn’t care to be a puzzle, least of all one that is solvable. She’s not tumblers and pins, neat chains of cause and effect; she doesn’t want to be picked over, laid bare, understood. If that means being alone, she’s survived worse. She will survive worse. She’s not sure that she can survive the opposite.

“Don’t,” she says again, and he shrugs.

“Okay,” Peter says, “but — unrelated, you know, nothing to do with it at all — if I were, just hypothetically, you understand, to say that I trust you. You know, with my life, or whatever. Just putting it out there. Hypothetically. Don’t shoot the messenger, and all that.”

“Shooting the messenger is a viable negotiation tactic,” Gamora says. Anyway, he’s trusted her with far more — all of Xandar, for a start; the Milano, a dozen times since then; his back, in more firefights than she cares to count — and it shouldn’t be a surprise. He doesn’t seem to put a massive premium on his own life anyway, in a strange pragmatic way. Peter isn’t a hero: he wouldn’t call himself one, and she doesn’t like to think in those terms to begin with; he just has a tendency towards heroism despite himself. It shouldn’t matter, then, that he says it so simply, and so casually.

“Just a thought,” he finishes. “Penny for your thoughts?”

It takes her a moment to parse, as idioms go. It isn’t fair, that he should be able to say things like that. She doesn’t say that. “Don’t say that,” she says, instead. “Don’t say things that you don’t believe.”

He spreads his hands. “I won’t if you don’t,” he says, and she shakes her head. He’s a good liar — has to be, for a thief and all-around rogue — but not right now, and she doesn’t know what would be worse: if he’s gotten good enough to lie to her this well, or if he actually believes what he’s saying. Either he’s a con or he’s a fool, and she doesn’t know which is preferable.

“You need a new coldpack,” she says instead, and he pokes gingerly at his lip and winces again. “Don’t,” she says, again, when he opens his mouth to say something else, and he shrugs and turns away.

It isn’t like him to admit defeat. She knows he’s turning it over in his head, so many moving parts and factors. It’ll come up again: as long as it doesn’t now, though, pursuit ships trailing them out of the system and supplies running low.

She turns back to the viewscreen and closes her eyes.

Space is nowhere near as quiet as the surfacebound tend to expect. Even in hard vacuum, without a suit, there’s the roar of blood; in a ship, Gamora dozes to the sound of engines humming, or the water recycler’s thrumming pulse, or Drax sharpening his blades, or Rocket building something that she wants to know nothing about. It’s grown comforting, background noise that lets her know that all is well, protection and promise.

Tonight, she goes to sit with Groot and Rocket a little before her watch starts. Groot has been restless lately, and Rocket says that he’ll need to be moved, soon, before he outgrows the ship. They’ll have to set down for a little while, maybe, or do without him, and neither of those is a particularly appealing possibility. Gamora will deal with it the way she always does, when it happens: pragmatically and to the best of her ability, whether that involves covering the angles that Groot usually does or simply finding a way to become briefly less restless.

“I know,” Rocket is saying, when she comes up the ladder. “I told him, Lady Constance, she says she’s going to gut you, you’re not walking out of there with all your bits, you know what I mean? She don’t mess around when it comes to organs, anyone could tell you that, just ask what’s-his-name in long-term care on Xandar. Or don’t. That kinda says it all.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, rather more high-pitched and less gravelly than usual.

“Well, that’s what these Terran idiots do,” Rocket says, “never mind how many times he’s been around the galaxy. Big eyes and a nice smile and they expect gravity to flip for them. Walk around like they already have what they want and it falls into their laps. If you ask me, it’s a pile of — oh, hey, Gamora, early morning?”

She shrugs. “You can rest early, if you’d like,” she says. “I could use some space to think.”

Gamora doesn’t mean it as a dismissal, and Rocket, brash as usual, doesn’t seem to take it as one; he shrugs, scooping up Groot’s pot, and makes his way to the ladder. “Don’t let space get to your head,” he advises. “You’re already talking to trees. Next it’ll be chairs, tables — wait, what if tables could talk? That would be _bad_. Talking to tables ain’t so bad, as long as they keep quiet. Good watch, anyway,” he says, and she can hear Groot chiding him as their voices fade down the corridor.

The sector they’re in now is uninhabited, for the most part, though that doesn’t mean that they’re in empty space by any definition of the phrase. A nebula off the Milano’s wing dwarfs them, folding and billowing on a scale that she can’t comprehend; the scanners pick up the constant sigh of dust around them, and the hiss of ionized gases. Gamora watches the faint shifts in temperature and color of newborn stars, too far to identify and too young to name, and sits with a sudden inevitability that she recognizes, but doesn’t want to articulate.

“Never gets old,” Peter says, and over her shoulder, she can see that he’s half-awake, creases on his cheek and hair flattened to the side, still blinking the sleep from his eyes.

“I’m amazed they didn’t wake you,” Gamora says. She’s been sitting in silence, while Rocket and Groot were, for all she knows, debating the tenets of creation and rewriting them from the ground up.

“Maybe I just didn’t feel like getting sucked into the Groot and Rocket show as Unwilling Bystander Number Two,” Peter says, and pushes himself up on his elbows. “Seriously, though, does it? Get old, you know. Since I’m a hopeless tourist and all.”

Gamora considers. Space was something that she grew up with, in promise if not in reality; she grew up in continuous motion, once her parents died, rarely seeing the same stars from one night to the next. To her, space is not the possibility of discovery, but of danger. It’s not something that she has fully come to terms with, but that in and of itself is some small comfort.

Still. “No,” she says. “It doesn’t.”

“Just get a better poker face, I guess,” Peter says. “Hey, wait, am I — should I shut up? I can shut up, space to think and everything, or I can go be somewhere else, I guess. I’m always up for a midnight kitchen raid—”

Gamora is pretty sure that Peter is constitutionally incapable of shutting up unless it’s his life on the line. “You’re fine,” she says, and stares back out over the Milano’s nose, the reflected light of a hundred far-off suns, and sees none of it beyond the distorted reflections in the viewscreen and her own untidy priorities.

“You sure?” Peter says, and she rubs her temple, traces the curve of an implant’s edge. She isn’t sure, not right now, of anything. Her equilibrium is shifting, and she isn’t sure where it’ll end, and who she’ll be when it resettles.

“Peter, I’m sure,” she lies, and listens to the rustle of blankets as he turns over, the way he shifts as he eases back into sleep and his breathing evens out, and is less certain than ever.

Everything settles. It’s one of the few laws that applies universally, regardless of star system or gravitational factors or breathable atmosphere. Bodies fall, and shift, and settle, until they can hold, and anything else takes a fight. To be anything other than the lowest common denominator takes effort, day in and day out, a constant offensive against entropy. Still — for all that Gamora has spent years, by any star system’s count, fighting her way up — everything settles, and collapses sometimes beyond measuring, into fixed points, simple in the fact of their existence, and otherwise unquantifiable.

It settles, for her, on some middle-of-nowhere moon. Peter’s nursing his left arm, Terran blood seeping dark through his shirt whenever he shifts. The planet’s surface is cracked, acrid smoke hissing out between the fragments, and visibility is terrible, though that hasn’t stopped Rocket from disappearing into the smoke, gun slung over his shoulder, chattering invective. It isn’t a deal, this time, but one of the hundred bounties out on them, collectively or individually she doesn’t know. They didn’t bother to specify. She’s pretty sure that the bounty is alive or dead, though, because they’re being none too careful with their aim. Drax is having the time of his life, as always; he took off with a gleeful roar into the flanking wing, some minutes ago, and their dismay is in evidence from the muffled yelling and indiscriminate chatter of weapons fire bouncing off the rock formations to their right.

“It’s almost like a field trip,” Peter says. “Did we pack him lunch? Where’s his line partner?”

“You make even less sense than usual,” Gamora says, which isn’t saying much. Unfortunately, he makes more and more sense the more time they spend together. Terran culture really isn’t that unique — most societies come up with the concept of the field trip sooner or later, whether it’s to a museum or a neighboring binary system — but Peter seems to take a particular delight in being obtuse, particularly when it’s not only irritating, but actively obstructive to little things like getting off this particularly unappealing rock alive.

“Line partners!” Peter says. “Like, you have a line of kids, right, and then you partner them up so that if one of them gets eaten by a bear or whatever, the other one has to come and tell you about it. Or something. I wasn’t great at line partners.”

“Put pressure on that,” Gamora says, absently, and he wraps an arm across his chest, over his jacket, to press his palm over the wound. “Can you make it back to the Milano?”

“Sure,” Peter says. “I always wanted to be dragged face-first across a planet with a surface like a gravel driveway when I pass out from blood loss.” Gamora glares at him and he relents. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Come on, give me a hand.”

“Fall back,” Gamora shouts into the smoke, and there’s a final rattle of weaponry and then silence.

“Spoilsport,” Rocket says, appearing with unsettling speed and silence for a heavily armed bundle of claws and teeth. “I was just starting to enjoy myself. Not a lot of uninhabited planets to blow up this side of Knowhere — oh, hey! Can we blow this one up? It’s pretty much uninhabited, right? They don’t count?” He jerks a claw back at the unhappy noises in the smoke.

Peter opens his mouth, probably to say something useless, vague, or, at worst, encouraging, and Gamora cuts him off. “No,” she says. “Nobody is blowing this moon up.”

“Seriously,” Rocket informs her. “Wet blanket. A hundred percent.”

“Peter!” Drax booms, and laughs. “I thought I smelled blood.”

“Whoa,” Peter says. “Creepy, dude.”

“It speaks to your fortitude,” Drax says. “You persist in your irritation even when gravely wounded.”

“You know what?” Peter says. “Never mind! You’re right. I am mighty. Did you hear that, Gamora? I’m mighty and persistent.”

“Persistent is right,” she says. “Come on, up,” and she offers him a hand, but even with her heels braced against rock, he only makes it halfway to his feet, and nearly pulls her over. “Come _on_ ,” she says, and he gets his other foot under himself, but his knees are locked in a way that indicates that he’ll probably fall over if he tries to move.

“Aw,” Rocket says. “Guess we have to drag him anyway.”

“I knew you heard that!” Peter says, in rather pained delight. “Watch out for my good side, though—”

“You have no good side,” Drax informs him, and peremptorily slings Peter over his shoulders with what looks like minimal effort.

“True,” Rocket says. “You can’t afford it.”

“Thanks, guys!” Peter says, somewhat muffled. “Great to have people in your corner!”

“Hey,” Rocket says, as Peter’s inanity fades, jolted and increasingly undignified, into the smoke. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Gamora says, because she is. Where Peter can afford confrontation, she prefers to evade, and it shows when he spends twice the time in the Milano’s medbay that she does. “You?”

“You know me,” Rocket says, thumping his chest. “Take no prisoners and no bullshit.”

“Will they be a problem?” Gamora says, and nods at the silhouettes grouping some distance away, straggly and full of trepidation.

“Eh,” Rocket says eloquently. She waits. “I mean, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” he elaborates. “Not with their fuel lines cut. You want I should make a point?” He mimes an explosion. Gamora could swear that it’s reflected in his eyes.

“Not necessary,” she says, and turns towards the Milano. “Fly us out of here, and see how long it is before they’re begging us to come back.”

“I like it,” Rocket says approvingly, and shoulders his gun, following her. “Neat and _mean_. My favorite.”

“I thought your favorite was explosive,” Gamora says.

“That’s my _specialty_ ,” Rocket says. “Just like Earth boy’s specialty is dumbass, you ever notice that?”

“You know,” Gamora says, “I hadn’t until you pointed it out.”

“Uh huh,” Rocket says. “Leaps before he looks. One day that kid is going to end up so much meat paste. What?” he says, in response to Gamora’s expression. “You were thinking it too!”

“I didn’t _say_ it,” Gamora says.

“Don’t make it any less true,” Rocket says, and the Milano is in sight now, cockpit closed but landing ramp down.

She doesn’t have any response to that.

Once Gamora settles the Milano into a stable orbit around a neutral planet three systems over, she leaves Rocket at the controls, Groot in the copilot’s chair, and heads down to the medbay. Drax claps her on the shoulder as he passes. “Well fought,” he says, and climbs the ladder. She smiles at his back, and considers. All in all, none of them are dead, and the Milano is in one piece. They’re going to need to take on an odd job or two to pay for fuel and replenish their food stores, now worryingly low, but that shouldn’t be an issue; this system has a noticeable mercenary deficit.

Peter’s sitting up, which is irritating; Drax, rather than doing something sensible like cut his shirt away, has apparently not only glued his shoulder back together, but secured a pad of gauze to it by the simple expedient of gluing it to his shirt as well. “Oh, hey, have we told Drax about medical tape?” Peter says, looking up. He’s still worryingly pale, even for a particularly pasty Terran, but either much better at putting a brave face on it or simply beyond self-preservation. “Because, seriously, I’m regretting telling him about superglue, but there’s no going back. Actually, maybe we shouldn’t tell him about medical tape.”

“Maybe you should try not needing to be taped together,” Gamora says.

“Hey, don’t bite my head off,” Peter says. “Believe me, I regret it as much as — more than you, definitely. I definitely regret getting _stapled in the arm_ more than you.” The metal that Drax presumably pulled out of Peter’s shoulder is still in the sink, off to the side of the bunk, nastily barbed and dark with dried blood.

“Impressive,” Gamora says.

“Thanks,” Peter says. “That’s what we aim for, right? Survived space office supplies? Though I’m really not looking forward to space thumbtacks.”

“You make no sense,” Gamora sighs, and perches on the bunk across from him. Why did she come down here? Drax did a more than adequate job of patching Peter back together; the rest relies on time and rest. She should have let Rocket get some rest, spent some time with Groot in the cockpit and stared at the distant coronas of this system’s binary stars; she should have done anything to keep herself from ending up here, in the smell of disinfectant and the only clean sheets on the Milano, clinical and empty and alone with Peter and that same inevitability.

“Gamora?” Peter says, and she’s been quiet for far too long. “Gamora, really, I’m fine. Come on. It’s all right.”

It isn’t all right. One day he’ll get himself killed, or Rocket or Drax will, and they won’t be able to pick up the pieces to grow a new one, and life will go on, worst of all, the way it did before, but this time she’ll have known them, and fought beside them, and she’ll know what’s gone.

“Hey,” Peter says, voice soft, and holds out a hand. “Come on, it’s okay—”

She shouldn’t think like this; she shouldn’t indulge herself, let alone him. One day they’ll have to settle, however briefly, and then someday after that they’ll have to stop running. Thanos isn’t her family — family are the people that she’s chosen for herself, that she would be happy to die for and among — but he doesn’t see it like that, and, at the end of a very long day, he’ll be waiting, and she can’t run forever. The universe isn’t big enough for that. If she has to die fighting him, she can at least do it without hurting anybody else. She can make it an earned death, and a neat one.

She takes his hand.

On Knowhere, his hand was warm on her hip, shockingly so; between exhaustion and tension, she couldn’t tell if that was normal, and now, drawn and pale as he is, his grip is more reassuring in its solidity than its warmth. It’s her turn to run hot, and he rubs his thumb between her knuckles, settling back. “See?” he says. “It’s okay.”

It’s collapsing, now, all of it, towards that singularity, possibilities folding together. On Knowhere, Gamora had pulled her sword on him, and now maybe she thinks that she had misjudged the situation, after all. Peter likes music, and indulgence, and tilting his head into the yellow sun, and using his boot rockets when he doesn’t feel like climbing hills. He’s immature and prone to exaggeration and slapdash, but sometimes — in the Kyln, feeling out the factors at play and negotiating at a breakneck pace for her life and their escape; in hard vacuum, outside Knowhere; a dozen times since — she can see why he’s so prone to leaps of faith. His particular combination of confidence and competence is intensely irritating, certainly, particularly to someone who, like her, has spent so many years working for it, and bleeding for it, and killing herself for it, body and soul. He can’t understand that.

He doesn’t pretend to, though, and that’s what Gamora thinks of now, and doesn’t want to think about what he must read on her face. She lifts the hand that isn’t curled into his to his face, and rests just her fingertips on his cheek, and lets the warmth of them bleed through, not moving.

“Gamora,” Peter starts.

“Don’t,” she says, and she’s scared in a way that she hasn’t been for a very, very long time, here at the center of some massive convergence, like artificial gravity has been cut. She can’t tell if she’s floating or falling. “Please, don’t,” Gamora says, and this time, when she leans in, he meets her.

It’s been a long time. Gamora realizes that she’s forgotten how much more pleasant kissing is with someone who she actually would like to be kissing, even this, guarded and careful, his hand tightening around hers as he follows her. When she pulls back, he doesn’t open his eyes for a moment, lips still parted, and the expression on his face is one that she doesn’t see often, for all that he’s easy to read. It’s not surprise, not quite, and it isn’t particularly wonder, either, but it’s something between the two, and there’s color in his cheeks, now. She tilts her head and considers that she would like to make Peter look like that more often.

“Was that—” Peter says, and she fights back a smile, as he visibly struggles for words. “Should I get shot more often? Is that the message here?”

She gives up, then, and lets herself smile. “Does everything have to be in code?” she says.

“Hey,” Peter says, “just saying, because that could totally be arranged—”

“Don’t get shot more often,” Gamora says. “You don’t have enough shirts for it, and we’re low on glue.”

“Those are sacrifices I’m willing to make,” Peter says, completely honestly, and she looks at her hand on his face, green on flushed pink, and raps him gently with a knuckle.

“I’m not,” she says, and gets up. “Get some rest.” Peter Quill, lost for words; far more satisfying than she’d expected.

“Huh,” he says. “Today has been full of surprises.”

“We live with a Rocket and a Groot,” Gamora says. “I’m surprised that anything registers anymore.”

“Space,” Peter says in explanation, spreading his hands, and winces. “Really never gets old. Hey!” he says. “Just thought of something.”

“No,” Gamora says. “Go to sleep.”

“Do you believe me now?” he says, and it shouldn’t sound like anything other than Peter proving a point from two sectors ago, shouldn’t sound as simply fond as it does.

“You’ve never been a good liar,” Gamora says, and holds up a hand, pausing in the doorway, to hush his protests. She can tell when Peter says things that he doesn’t believe. That’s his strength, as a thief; he can make himself believe anything, and then it becomes true, for a moment, just for long enough. Now, even though he isn’t saying anything, there’s belief writ large across his face, and hope. “Does it matter?”

“Just as long as you know,” he says, confident as the best grifters in the galaxy, and — she does, and it’s not so terrible after all, at least for now — the engines hum, beneath her feet, in the hallway, and the light of a flare washes down from the cockpit, and here and now, in an unfathomably large universe and an unfamiliar system, none of it matters, because she’s home.

 


End file.
